Let's Walk (with Halli)
Go for a walk with Halli as he chats with creative people about their life and work.
Let's Walk (with Halli)
Seth Godin : Strategy, AI, and Finding Your Path
What drives our creative pursuits, and how do we navigate a world where entire industries are being transformed overnight? In this illuminating conversation with marketing legend Seth Godin, we explore the deeper motivations behind our work and how to find sustainable fuel for creativity in an age of constant change.
Seth shares a pivotal revelation from his own journey—the moment he realized external validation like bestseller lists and reviews were empty metrics that didn't reflect true impact. This epiphany led him to "fire" certain measurements from his life, freeing him to focus on creating genuine value rather than chasing approval. His perspective on finding better fuel for our work offers a refreshing alternative to the burnout-inducing cycle of seeking validation.
As we delve into the evolving landscape of publishing, speaking, and idea-sharing, Seth introduces his concept of the "smallest viable audience"—a powerful framework for anyone struggling to be heard in today's crowded marketplace. Rather than trying to appeal to everyone, he suggests focusing on serving a specific group whose lives would meaningfully improve through your work. "If you pick an industry or a moment in time or segment and you can reach those people with something that they must talk about, they will because they must," he explains.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn as we explore artificial intelligence—what Seth considers "the biggest change in our world since electricity." With characteristic nuance, he acknowledges both the challenges and possibilities this technology presents, suggesting that AI might ultimately help humans connect in ways even more powerful than the internet. His balanced perspective offers a thoughtful alternative to both techno-utopianism and doomerism.
Whether you're a creator navigating a changing industry, a business leader refining your strategy, or simply someone trying to make sense of our rapidly evolving world, this conversation offers valuable insights on finding your path forward with intention and optimism.
well, hello again. How's it going?
Speaker 2:hello, here we are again. Here we are again how are you?
Speaker 1:we're good yeah, I'm in iceland right now yeah I'm gonna go to new york talk to our, our guests with seth godin. But we I've been hosting this sort of a game night with the friend of mine for the last three years, a monthly game night, and we've sort of evolved the concept over time. It started off as poker, then we went into other board games and right now it's it's getting into a really good rhythm. Where it's it's about 10 people and the it's so it's the two of us, and usually my wife joins not always if she's around so there's seven or eight other people and those people are always new people. So we invite, each of us invites three to four people, and it's always this weird eclectic mix of just different kinds of people.
Speaker 1:Personalities and characters characters yes, and nobody knows who's going to come. I don't know who he's inviting. Really, he doesn't know who I'm inviting. Obviously, none of the guests know who's coming oh, that sounds fun and then we've then we changed it a few months ago, which has been a great change which there's also dinner, so everyone brings uh, this is like a potluck, or yeah, that that was going to be my main concern.
Speaker 2:I hope there's food there. Yes, okay, okay, amazing, wonderful. This got incrementally better. Okay, cool yeah Okay.
Speaker 1:So every time we do this I feel sort of reinvigorated, because getting to meet new people is always fun and we try and invite people. Usually, I try and invite people that I don't know really well or don't know at all, and there are just people that I would like to get to know and there is something really great about you know, I have old friends that I enjoy, but we talk about old friend things. Usually it's always the stories are always remember when yes, membarians, and these yes.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And then these groups are more, you know, just getting to know different people and different ideas and what people are doing and thinking, and it's amazing.
Speaker 2:This sounds fabulous. Yes, sounds fabulous. I love the idea of this. I've been lucky enough to go to a couple of dinner parties of this nature and I've always had a blast.
Speaker 2:You know, randomly got invited to a Salvadorador dali uh, surrealist dinner okay me being a lady that takes an assignment pretty firm grasp by and I work in hollywood. I went to a costume rental place like hollywood, like, not like, not like party city. I went to like a because I really wanted to have like an insane headpiece on like from like a rio de janeiro think rio de janeiro, yeah and because it was like the surrealist Salvatore Dali party and then the sequined dress and this, and then my husband was all cute and then we showed up and everybody was just wearing like flip-flops and I was like what's happening? But of course, it turned into a very, very interesting night, but I love this. I love it. So you do this mainly back home in Iceland.
Speaker 1:Yes, I this all out. You do this mainly, and back home in iceland uh, yes, I've only done this in iceland, um, but I think it will be really fun to experiment with this. You kind of need, obviously you need an apartment, and usually when I'm traveling I'm in hotels because and these are long so people show up at 6 pm and it's usually until midnight oh yeah, wow, wow yeah so it's a long commitment, it's a long session.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, we could do it when you're next in Los Angeles. We could do it at my house, but with the condition that's like a day party, because we do LA, we do early here, so people can start at 12 noon and be here till 6 or whatever. Right? Yeah, I love that Absolutely. We should do that. We should do that.
Speaker 1:Well, let's jump into our guest for today. So for today. So I'm going to go talk to a guy that I met a few years ago. I was doing a talk in New York at a conference and this guy comes up to me afterwards that I, you know, I knew who he was before and he came up to me and he was very, very sort of gracious about my talk and we've stayed in touch through the years. His name is Seth Godin. He is a I don't really know how to frame him. He's done a lot of things, I think. In general, he just likes to think about stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that's the most general thing that I can say about him, and those things can be a lot of. It is sort of marketing related, but there's always something new and interesting and there's a twist about him that I really like. And then the other thing that I've found with him is because we talk every now and then and he is not only extremely smart, which is great, but he's also very, very generous with his wisdom, yes, and so he's a person that I can call and run through thoughts and ideas, and he will actually engage and think about them and then even send me notes afterwards, and he's just a wonderful, wonderful person. So I'm really excited to get to meet him again.
Speaker 2:That sounds incredible because I feel like, in the time that we're living these days, is that our precious commodity is time and for somebody to devote his time listening to you and you know, just ponder, and yeah, he seems like I've. When he, when he told me about this guy, I was like wait, who's this? And then I Googled him and of course I've seen him on multiple appearances on TV as an incredible panelist and always he seems to have an unending like thirst for a solution and he seems to be like so kind and optimistic about things that even at the things and how things are seem quite daunting. But he seems to be always like digging himself out of a hole is like his favorite thing to do, because like there's no hole, the hole is just gonna get. We're gonna make the hole bigger, I'm gonna throw a party at it, like it's basically.
Speaker 2:But I do remember distinctly because, uh, when we're talking about him, like he said something that I really have listened to and kind of lived by, which he talks about mistakes and making a mistake, and then there was something about the take of it not being a mistake. You just maybe you didn't make a mistake, maybe there was just a bad outcome, and I think this is like a really positive way to frame certain things. Of course, people do make mistakes. There was definitely mistakes, yeah, like, and I think he made a point of like you always take this train at the same time, but if that train broke down, you didn't make a mistake, you had a bad outcome. So I mean to explain marketing things and this, that and the other. So I'm very excited to hear what you guys have to talk about and I'm sure you're talking about because he's always been quite techie, didn't? He used to work at Yahoo.
Speaker 1:Yes, he was. If I remember, he was the VP of marketing at Yahoo, wow, something to that effect. I might be getting it wrong, but he invented a lot of things Sometimes people talk about. Somebody wrote the book about this. The book, yes, he wrote the book about so many things. He wrote the book about virality.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:He wrote the book about direct marketing. He wrote the book about permission marketing and wrote the book about sort of permission marketing and he's written I can't, I don't know dozens of books. He's been New York Times bestseller.
Speaker 2:He's been Dozens and dozens of books, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he also. He has a blog. I think he's been running for almost 30 years, which is just tipped over the 10,000 blog posts mark, which is a lot, wow. And every single one of them is. You learn something from reading every single one of them. So, yeah, I think every time I talk to him, it's just there's something new and fascinating. And you're right, there's a side of me, even though I work in tech, that sometimes tilts into pessimism. He always has a. He's not naive in that sense. He just he always looks at things as like, yes, this is going to happen, so let's make the most and the best of it. And so I want to talk to him about AI and, obviously, his new book. He just wrote a book about strategy. So, yeah, really excited to go to New York and get to talk to him. He lives in a little town just north of New York City and I'm going to take the train there, speaking of trains, and so, yeah, really excited for this and let's talk when I get back.
Speaker 2:Can't wait to hear it bud, have fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks, bye, bye, bye. Well, maybe we can start with the hole.
Speaker 3:Right the bottomless hole.
Speaker 1:So, everyone needs fuel. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the fuel that they want us to have, that we're indoctrinated to have, is the fuel of compliance, right that I got to go to work today because that's what I've been doing since I was in first grade. I got to do a good enough job that I'm not going to fail and be left behind or be embarrassed or be shamed. I grew up, like many people who don't have a long attention span, with a different sort of posture, which is I got to create something today and I have to figure out an interesting thing to do or contribute. And the problem is that most of the time when you're doing things that are interesting, you get pushback so you start telling yourself that's not going to work. That's not going to work. It's easier to just sit back and do less, and so you got to look for fuel.
Speaker 3:Some of the people I know, some of my colleagues, their fuel is revenge and showing the skeptics that they were wrong all along. And this is the fuel of the billions TV show. This is the fuel of I'll show them. And that is terrible fuel because it doesn't burn clean. Sooner or later it will just break. What other kinds of fuel are there? Well, my fuel over time shifted from. I have something I'm trying to create that matches my vision of how I can contribute to do the people I respect, like what I just did, and that shift is essential if you're going to make something for a market, because you can't just make things for yourself.
Speaker 3:But it gets in the way when you spend too much time in a circle of people that are keeping track of a different sort of status. Right, and it can lead to you saying, well, I got to make sure I'm eating in the right place or wearing the right clothes or being published by the right publisher. Got to make sure I'm eating in the right place or wearing the right clothes or being published by the right publisher. So what I found myself doing was what are my Amazon reviews look like? How many people watch my TED talk? Things that were easy measurement but not useful measurement, and so many cycles in social media have shown up to get people hooked on. That, like the New York Times bestseller list, is one of those examples. The New York Times bestseller list is not true. It's not a measure of any actual bestseller status, but it's a badge that lets you feel like you've pleased the right people and gives you a certain sort of status in the community, and so authors, I know, will break their relationships with their whole networks of people who trust them, will shift from being authors to hustlers and hasslers so that for one week, they can get this number to go up, and it doesn't make a better book and it doesn't make a better life and it doesn't make much of anything. You're doing better, and so I just decided to fire the times bestseller list.
Speaker 3:I decided to stop reading amazon reviews completely, because you can't do it a little bit, and I said to myself I'm never going to write this book again. So if someone gives me a one-star amazon review, I will learn nothing other than it wasn't for them right, because someone else gave it five stars. So what? What have I learned? Nothing, and even great books get one-star reviews by great authors. So I just stopped. I just stopped paying attention to the easy-to-measure prizes that are attempting to use as fuel and, as a result, I have a lot more space in my day and I think my work is getting better. That was a long answer.
Speaker 1:When did this start to happen, this shift? And actually, what was the original fuel?
Speaker 3:Well, the original fuel was. It started at my very first job, when I was 23 years old. I walked into Spinnaker Software and there were 30 people. It was a startup company that invented educational computer games and I was a summer intern and I walk into the office and in those days there was no voicemail.
Speaker 3:There was just those little pink while you were out slips and there's a round carousel in the center of the receptionist's desk that has 50 slots in it with those little Dymo labels with everyone's name on it, and you spin it, and spin it till you find your name and see your messages. And I look in the first day and I think if I'm going to be here for a few months I have to spin this thing five times a day. This is absurd. It's not in alphabetical order, it's in the order everyone was high Like. This makes no sense.
Speaker 3:So I grab a paperclip and I put it next to my name hurting nobody because I'm thinking to myself not only will this help me, but people who know that their slots near my slot will just look for my paper clip and they'll be able to find theirs. And not making this up within four hours. There were 20 different little paper sculptures all over this and I saved the you know hours of hassle spinning, because to spin to your paperclip you're done. I was as proud of that as writing a best-selling book, because I was like oh, that didn't cost anybody anything, it was fun, it worked. Other people got something out of it. That was my fuel. The problem is no one's going to pay me for paperclip solutions.
Speaker 1:So what did they pay you for?
Speaker 3:They'll pay you if a book sells a lot of copies right, they'll pay you if you give a talk and it changes people. So you have to be more than just I did this to amuse myself. You have to understand, and great designers like you know this. You already know what the button means. You made the button. That's not what the button is for. The button is for other people who have never seen the button, to understand what the button is and do what needs to be done. It's intentional. So you have to measure something, but you got to measure the right thing.
Speaker 1:And when were you able to start changing from being reactionary to sort of more it's coming from inside of you and being self-fulfilled?
Speaker 3:um, I'm not. I'm not ready to claim that I'm self-fulfilled.
Speaker 3:I'm ready to claim more self-fulfilled I'm looking for different metrics that are useful and resilient. So what happened was after permission. Marketing was a bestseller, which was very gratifying to have the world see an idea I had and embrace it so completely. I mean, inventing email marketing is something that I'm happy to claim I did because it's everywhere, but when I first built it and wrote about it, everyone said I was ridiculous, it wasn't going to work. So that was really really exciting. So you look to have that happen again.
Speaker 3:I was giving a seminar in my office to 30 people and my agent, whose office was down the hall, walks in with a fax and it's the bestseller list showing that my next book was the best seller, and I felt absolutely nothing inside. I felt completely empty, which made me really sad because the feeling that had been so useful to me was gone. I realized the reason it was gone is because what I was seeing was that the way I had promoted my book had worked, the way I had promoted the book had worked. I had promoted my book had worked the way I promoted the book had worked. Not that the book had worked, because how a book sells in the first week is not the point, and so that was a clue, but then it took a bunch of years after that of paying attention to which metrics were making me happy and why those metrics were making me happy, and how to find things that I thought would be worth measuring.
Speaker 1:So now is it? You have a group of people that you look to as your measurements. You have colleagues and friends and people you say, if they like it, it's good.
Speaker 3:This is a great question. I think for different projects and different problems you have to ask different people, because empathy professional empathy is really scarce to find somebody. You know the fisher price toy company nobody who works there is three years old. They all have empathy for three-year-olds. They can all imagine if a three-year-old is going to like a toy or not.
Speaker 3:But the typical adult, if you say, do you like this, do you like this?
Speaker 3:Blog post, book cover, business idea, website, they're going to only talk about their gut reaction, not amplifying it across a group of people who don't know what they know, don't like what they want, don't want to see what they see right, and so you got to be really picky about who gets to see the work.
Speaker 3:That's early, and I've discovered many times that I've walked away from projects I should have run after or stuck with things I shouldn't have, because I asked the wrong people and there's no magic solution, but it makes a big difference to be thoughtful about it and you should probably never ask your family, because your family cares about you as a person more than they care about the project and they're trying to protect you, and so if you're looking for someone to cheer you on. It helps to start by saying to yourself who are the people who, when I show them something, you're going to cheer me on. And second, maybe even tell the people you're showing your new idea to I'd like you to cheer me on. Please don't tell me not to do this, but please tell me five ways to make it even better.
Speaker 1:So who do you ask? Who do you like? If? If, how would you recommend? One of my problems that I've found is to your point is you know, the people that surround you care about you. They are not honest about what they think about something and at the same, when I had my company, the employees are not honest. Even you know, as much as I encouraged it or tried to encourage it, there's still. There's a power dynamic where, when the next raise is up, or there has to be cuts, or who gets the next fun project, or whatever it is, everyone is in part playing a game, even though sometimes they don't even fully realize it, and so getting honest feedback from someone is extremely hard in a group of people you already know. Who do you go to All right, right.
Speaker 3:Well, let's break this, this idea of feedback down, because ideally, what we want is someone who is quite expert at explaining the dynamics, the taxonomy, the market structure and the emotional, creative content to get to the heart of it. I'm egomaniacal enough to believe that I am one of those people If you show me your book and tell me who you want to buy your book.
Speaker 3:I think I can help you see genre and how to reconstruct it. But one of the reasons I've gotten good at it is because I've always wanted someone to be good at that for me, and it's very hard to find. So what I usually do is I don't ask, I don't begin with, either up down is this a good idea? Questions or open ended. Let's have an ongoing conversation about what I should do here. It's more about multiple choice and incremental improvement, right? So here are three things I'm thinking of doing. Which one of these do you prefer and why?
Speaker 3:That shifts somebody from one posture to another, because they know you're going to do something, and so now you can get a different kind of honesty from people. And one thing I learned from a friend of mine is if you're going to do a significant project, don't write one business plan. Mind is, if you're going to do a significant project, don't write one business plan. Write three completely different business plans and commit to doing whichever one the person you're asking for advice points to. Because that dynamic of having to have three things you're willing to live with opens the door for your ideas to get better before you even show them to somebody, because now you're not defending your one and only magical idea anymore. You are collaborating with someone on how do I make this better. That's implied in the fact that there's more than one.
Speaker 1:So that's how would you start a book like that? Do you have a premise and then you have three different ways of attacking it?
Speaker 3:So when I used to make books with a single-minded focus on this is what I do I make books I would have many in the works all at the same time and I would regularly write a whole bunch of a book and no one would ever see it. That falling in love with the one and only idea was a luxury I did not have, because I was doing it as a book packager with a team of people. You never knew when it was going to blow up. You couldn't just have one.
Speaker 3:As my career has gone on the last five books or so, no one saw the book until it was almost done. Because what I discovered is there was no chance I was going to write a book that fit in all the way to whatever hole was available. There's too many books. I had to write something that stood out, that was singular, that wasn't compromised, because that was the only chance I had to make it worth writing, because lots and lots of people were trying to write a book that fits in. But it takes a different kind of brashness to write one that doesn't match and doesn't even have a section of the store it's supposed to go in. You could call that arrogant, and it might be, but in today's world of book publishing it's totally doable, because no one can tell you you can't do it.
Speaker 1:I was just on my way here, I was listening to your book, the latest book, the Strategy just to use your words against you, the latest book, this Strategy just to use your words against you. In that book you talked about, you have to kind of it's not a good idea to fight a system. Yep, you go into the system and then you sort of make the system work for you With what you just said. How does that apply? Like, how do you, if you're writing books that don't have a section to go to? How are you fitting into the system?
Speaker 3:Okay, so let's break this into pieces for our viewers at home. Uh-huh. What is the system? A system is a secret conspiracy. That's not secret. A system is a secret conspiracy. That's not secret.
Speaker 3:It's the way a whole bunch of people, many of whom don't know each other, work together to create the world as we know it. So in the United States, the system is you drive on the right side of the road. No one gets a vote. Everyone drives on the right side of the road. It works better that way. More complicated systems are.
Speaker 3:You know what's the pecking order in a high school, and why is it that certain kids are seen as cool and other kids aren't? What is the system of higher education that gets a parent who has a six-year-old wondering about the kid's grades? Why do you care about the kid's grades? They're six. You care about the kid's grades because you want them to go to a famous college. Why do you want them to go to a famous college? So your status as a parent will be assured and it's all built in. You don't think that's what you're doing, but it's what you're doing.
Speaker 3:So the book system has been around for 500 years and in the last 15 years it has completely turned over, changed forever, and so when I was a book packager in the 80s and 90s, every time I tried to change the system of book publishing, my project failed Because the system of book publishing did not want to change and I didn't have enough power to do anything about it. So I only began to succeed when the work I did rhymed and matched what the system wanted. But today, in 2025, the book system is a shambles. It's falling apart.
Speaker 3:That's bad news if you want to have a reliable bestseller published by Simon Schuster, but it's really good news if you want to write a book that doesn't fit in the section of the bookstore or you want to write a book that's priced differently or sold differently, because you're not at a disadvantage, because there's no system to work again. So if I was trying to maximize the number of people I was reaching, there's no way I'd write a book. If I was trying to maximize the profit I was making, there's no way I would write a book. But there are lots of things you get out of a book besides those two things.
Speaker 1:Which are.
Speaker 3:Well, first there's the satisfaction of crafting something for a year that holds up. There's the Proustian value of handing someone a book that doesn't need to be plugged in, doesn't need an instruction manual and that they can share. And there's the status that comes from being able to say I wrote the book on this topic, and that status gives you the ability to make changes in a culture that still values that sort of intellectual leadership did you?
Speaker 1:I mean you've you've been a very prolific speaker as well, although I think you've sort of toned that down a little bit, if I remember correctly I'm I'm not flying for work, so that cuts down the number of venues I can go show up and speak at. When you would go to these things, especially as you were flying across the world. Was that part of the experience of writing the book? It was a ticket to get to those places, get into those sometimes small rooms or big rooms.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the system of public speaking is super fascinating because there was a period of time it's starting to come to a close when you could make a very significant living showing up in front of a bunch of strangers, making an impact for 45 minutes and leaving. So the question is how does a venue that's hiring a speaker decide who to hire? Well, they either hire somebody who their boss knows of, who's well known and has better things to do than go give a speech. The fact that they are coming to the room earns status for the group. Can you believe we got Henry Kissinger to come here of all the places he could be? And sometimes they pick a speaker because they are seen by a community of people as expert on a topic. And folks were this magical shortcut, without becoming secretary of state, to be able to have the chance to show up in this room. And the beauty of showing up in the room is lots and lots of people don't buy a book or don't read a book, but if they're in the room with you and you can share your energy with them, maybe you can make an impact.
Speaker 3:Once I saw the system of professional speaking and I knew I would never be Neil Armstrong, because they weren't going to fly me to the moon. How do I get to do? Well, if I write a book, I get to talk about it, and those two things fit together for me in a way that I liked. So I don't think I ever wrote a book because I needed a new thing to talk about, but since I was talking, it would lead me to talk about things that I then decided would benefit from being in a book.
Speaker 1:And I think you said so. This industry is dying. The speaking industry is dying as well, or changing.
Speaker 3:It's changing dramatically. So TED the first thing TED did was it let a whole new generation of speakers be seen by millions of people. So folks like my friend Simon Sinek and Brene Brown. They succeeded because their TED Talks took off and then they wrote books about it. And that was new. That didn't used to happen.
Speaker 3:The second thing that happened was it taught audiences to demand TED quality talk from people. So you couldn't go and mumble your way through the way you used to be able to, because they had seen what a good talk was supposed to look like. And then when covid hit the whole industry of let's just book some speakers, get a convention center and people will come and we'll make a profit, that industry just cratered because people weren't flying anywhere. And as we've come back from that, people are being much pickier about which events they go to and why they go there. So there are still people who are giving speeches and it's still an industry, but it is not the kind of weird sort of scarcity that was present during the thousand speeches that I gave in that 30-year period of time, but the speaking career was more lucrative than the writing career.
Speaker 3:Oh, there's no comparison. Someone's going to win the lottery and it's probably not going to be you. Like you and I talked briefly, I think you should write a book and I would be delighted to help you. But you shouldn't write a book because you want to have a jackpot, because it's not going to happen. Justin Timberlake's autobiography. Justin Timberlake right. His autobiography sold 300 copies the first month. 300, not 300,000. 300. So no, it's not a ticket to much of anything.
Speaker 1:What do you do then as an author, if you're starting now?
Speaker 3:So when you pick your customers, you pick your future. If you're a designer, when you pick your users, you pick your future, because your users are defining what you're going to make. If you're someone with ideas, when you pick your medium, all of those things come with it. Built into your question is an assumption, which is that you should have a book. That might not be where you should bring your idea, that maybe your idea isn't perfectly sized for 300 pages. Maybe your idea is perfectly sized to be seven minutes long and shared by four million people, and if that happens, then the souvenir edition of your idea will have plenty of sales in book form. But the idea freed from the pages is really what you're after. The book is just a souvenir.
Speaker 1:And what do you think are good formats? I mean, do you recommend them, just going on YouTube?
Speaker 3:No, this idea that you can put an idea onto social media and it will, because it's good, spread to millions of people is another way of thinking about the lottery. Someone is going to have 40 million views, but it's probably not going to be you. It's a different approach. So I wrote one of the first books about going viral. My book went viral and the reason it did is because I took Unleashing the Idea Virus, the book I wrote. I gave the whole book away for free in PDF form at a time when no one had ever done that. So, because I had a small platform, I could tell 10,000 people about it. Those 10,000 people downloaded it and they told other people because that was news in and of itself. And that's how it got to 4 million downloads in two months, because there was news before you read the book. And then the book was useful enough that you would share it, because it was certainly worth more than what it costs, which was zero.
Speaker 3:But that approach would never work today because that's not news. So when I think about how does someone spread an idea, we don't start with how do I get the biggest possible audience. It's how do I serve the smallest viable audience, the smallest group of people, that would be enough. So if you pick an industry or a moment in time or segment and you can reach those people with something that they must talk about, that they must connect around, they will because they must. So what you get then is this chance to be on the hook to say I wrote this for 4,000 people.
Speaker 3:If these 4,000 people don't love it, connect with it and spread it, I have failed and I can do better next time. But if they do, it will go from 4,000 people. If these 4,000 people don't love it, connect with it and spread it, I have failed and I can do better next time. But if they do, it will go from 4,000 to 8,000, et cetera. That is very different than saying I make pretty good stuff for most people. I hope you'll pick me. You don't want to say if you're looking for anyone, I'm anyone. You want to say I am a specific, meaningful contribution here and there isn't a substitute. If I'm not in this conversation, the conversation doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:And where are you? Where do you place yourself in that? What conversation if you're not part of, it is in the conversation.
Speaker 3:The breakthrough book in the arc of what I do was Purple Cow. And what Purple Cow said is if you make average stuff for average people, you will fail, because mass advertising is dead. And this was a non-trivial idea 22 years ago. So 5,000 people bought the book. I self-published it.
Speaker 3:Those 5,000 people had a real incentive to talk to their boss about what was in the book, because they want not because they like meat, but because they wanted to work at a company that did the kind of thing I was talking about. So if they could hand their boss the book or talk about the phrase purple cow, their status would go up, their day would get better. And it was only 5,000 people. Well, that got me to 10,000 and then 20,000. Those 20,000 people who were reading Fast Company Magazine at the time.
Speaker 3:When you add that up, it was the kernel that then established a tiny cultural beachhead that led to the next thing and the next thing. So the lesson I learned from that, which I've repeated over and over again, is there's probably, for whatever important idea you want to share, a group of people whose lives would be better if their friends shared it too. And that's like you know, the book this Is. Strategy is designed so that someone who gets the joke will have a tool to help their clueless coworker also get the joke. And if I'm not giving them a useful tool, they're not going to talk about my book.
Speaker 1:And what is the book about?
Speaker 3:The book is about the philosophy of becoming. You don't get tomorrow over again, so how are you going to spend it? You have time to spend tomorrow, you have maybe money to spend tomorrow. You have effort to spend tomorrow. Why are you spending it on this? Not what are the tactics and chores and tasks, but what are the choices and decisions that you want to be on the hook for to make a change happen in the world. Can you tell me the system you're in, the people who are in that system and the change you're trying to make? Because if you can't, then please work on something that is worth working on, because just doing the tasks isn't helping you make a change happen and what is?
Speaker 1:how does that apply to a real life situation? Can you give an example, because a lot of people talk about strategy. It's it's a word that is used by every company, usually differently. Correct what is your. First of all, what is your definition of strategy?
Speaker 3:So tactics are tasks. The tasks keep changing, the strategy doesn't. The strategy is what game are we playing here over time, in which system to make a change happen? So any institution or person who is succeeding regularly has a strategy, whether they say it out loud or not. So for a very long time Microsoft's strategy was simple. Our strategy is we want to be the IBM of software. Ibm's strategy was no one ever got fired for buying IBM. We're going to be the computer solution that every big company picks, because every other big company is picking it. We don't have to have the fastest computers, we just have to have the most support and most deniability for organizations. And every time Microsoft did that, they did fine, and when they lost their way, that's because they weren't doing that right.
Speaker 3:Apple's strategy is to make luxury digital goods. Luxury means it costs a lot and it's worth it because it costs a lot. The price itself is part of its value and there's a design element to what they're doing that people with good taste about digital interactions can't live without. So every time Apple leans into that strategy, whatever tactics they come up with, they do fine. And Apple TV makes absolutely no sense because Apple TV is not a luxury good about a digital experience, and you can't tell by looking at a show whether Apple made it or not. So if they had been strategic, they never would have wasted all that time and money on Apple TV.
Speaker 1:Apple TV Plus.
Speaker 3:In the US. Apple TV is like Netflix.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, yeah, okay. Well, let's dig into that. Maybe as an example, if you're Tim Cook and you're deciding whether to start a TV division, you have a built-in audience that all have your devices. A bunch of them have the actual hardware that is used to watch it, and then you have at that time, netflix was booming you have a company that's sort of growing really fast. They're producing their own content. Yeah, and what? How do you talk yourself out of the sort of what's seemingly obvious as well? We're already apple, we're doing all these things, but why are we, why are we missing out on the streaming?
Speaker 3:So it's interesting, because part of the challenge of talking about Apple is there's only one Apple, so you can make all these magical, profound statements that aren't helpful to other people. But briefly, I would say this Apple was perfectly positioned to make a car, because you notice a car every time it drives by. It's a luxury. Good Design matters. You can make a car in the Apple way that would be demonstrably more Apple-like than other cars. None of those things are true about a streaming channel. You are entering a market where the difference between a successful streaming channel and unsuccessful streaming channel is whether you have good shows. If you have good shows, more people watch, but the way you get good shows is by paying money for good shows. That's not Apple's skill set, so none of the things that Apple stands for or is good at makes happen there.
Speaker 3:The mistake that Tim made shortly after he took over. He made, I think, two mistakes. First of all, he decided his goal was to make the stock price go up, which he's been very, very successful at, at the expense of the innovation that matters to people like me. But the second mistake that he made was because Steve didn't really like the internet. Apple walked away from every possible magical interaction that they could have created by building websites. That would have been extraordinary. Apple should have built Zoom. Apple should have built a much better, kinder version of Twitter. Apple should have built so many things that match their persona and what their users need and want, but instead they got distracted by thinking they needed to just build more watches.
Speaker 1:Do people call you? You don't travel for work, but do you get calls from CEOs that are wayward and feel like they've lost their way on what their strategy is and who they are?
Speaker 3:So where we started, we were talking about what I use for fuel. One of the decisions I made 30 years ago is never to do consulting. So I haven't done one day of consulting. But what I love to do is give free advice to my friends, and usually my friends are creators and people with small organizations or the leaders of significant nonprofits. So I spend a lot of time with those people working on strategy. I would say I spent more time doing that than anything else, behind the scenes, pitching in with authors or nonprofits or people in between and saying do you see the system and how you can make a difference here? But Steve Ballmer has never called me and asked me for strategy advice.
Speaker 1:What would you tell him?
Speaker 3:I would tell him to quit because he was the worst CEO in the history of major corporations, because he didn't understand that Microsoft was at a scale where they couldn't make a system all by themselves but if they saw a system evolving, they could show up and influence that system in a way that they and their shareholders and their users would really benefit from. And I think that the new leadership at Microsoft fully understands is leaning in to things like LinkedIn and things like.
Speaker 3:AI in a way that they can influence the system that match the original mindset that Bill brought to the company. One of the problems with being a CEO, as you and I have both seen firsthand, is in our modern world, being a CEO is a lot like being royalty. You're surrounded by people who tell you everything you're doing is right. You have your own Air Force. You walk around thinking like a king as opposed to being user-focused and saying where do I create value today? Because if you create enough value in the system you're in, you get to do it again tomorrow.
Speaker 1:There's a thread to your books. Yeah, at least you know I haven't read all of them Very prolific there's definitely a thread to them. What is the sort of? Do you have an end game, or is it just every year, as the world changes? You see, ah, there's a need to redefine, reexamine this concept, this idea.
Speaker 3:Or do you have a math? So I used to wake up in the morning saying I need to come up with a book because I'm in the book business. Before I was a bestselling author, I did 120 books as a book packager. I did books about gardening stain removal and I did a book a month for 12 years removal, and I did a book a month for 12 years. So that habit faded about eight books ago because publishing a book today is just way too hard. Writing a book is still the same, but publishing it, doing a hundred podcasts going out in the world, making it sell I just don't get any pleasure out of that. My end game is don't write any more books. Just don't write any more books. You have a blog, more people read the blog. Just write that. Or build software systems that are generative. So I'd like to think that the Song of Significance, this is marketing and this is strategy, those three books together encapsulate what I've been trying to say for 30 years and that's it.
Speaker 3:And I'm not ready to write another book and I, if I come up with one, I'm going to do it so you're done I've said that before, okay, so I'm hesitant to say it again, because my friends make fun of me for saying it all the time you meaning you've said it I've seen and then read, then written another book yeah, I mean, I've seen publishing dying, with people I care about inside it fighting unsuccessfully.
Speaker 3:You know it's just just share a number. There's something in book publishing called the lay down. The lay down is how many books you got to print and distribute in the first week to fill the bookstore channel. Now, it's worth noting bookstores are all full, so the only way for a new book to get into a bookstore is for an old book to go out. So already you got the zero something going on the lay down for a pretty good book, a significant but not giant book, was 20,000. For 50 years when a book came out, 20,000 copies would go into the world. Do you know what the lay down is? Now 120.
Speaker 1:And that's supposed to be enough. That's enough to fill.
Speaker 3:Amazon only needs three, and Amazon does half your sales, and so, as a result, more and more books are getting published, because it's so much easier to put it into Amazon. We went from 40,000 books a year to a million, so the number of books went up by a factor of 20 and the sales per book went down by a factor of 20, because the number of books being sold isn't changing. It's just not a medium. That means what it used to mean in terms of how do I spread an idea. If I write a blog post that resonates, I'm going to reach over a million people in a week.
Speaker 1:I can't come close to that with a book and your blog just reached 10,000 posts, and you started that when.
Speaker 3:Started that 26 years ago, but before that it was an email newsletter, but I can't find it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you have 10,000 posts that are live on your site archived. Yeah, have you deleted anything?
Speaker 3:I deleted a post the other day. There are a few posts where I was writing about something that was super timely and doesn't make any sense now, or just had so many dead links I didn't want to do it, leave it there.
Speaker 1:But there are no posts I've deleted because I was embarrassed about my point of view and the focus of the of the blog is an extension of of the books, or or the other way around, maybe it's usually the other way around.
Speaker 3:so the idea of the blog is if you see something in the world and you don't understand how it works, do you just say oh, or do you try to understand how it works and come up with an explanation for it? You know, hearing the talk you gave in Brooklyn, that's when I knew we were brothers at some level, because that's how you look at the world, at least as far as I can tell, in public. It doesn't make any sense to just let it sit there unexplained. So the fuel for my blog is am I looking at something today that some people aren't noticing or some people could be doing something useful with? Can I explain it as cogently as I can in a way that might get them to take action? Most of the people who read my blog think, before they read it, that they understood it's something. But once they read it they go oh, I have a friend who needs to see this and they send it to them. That's a good blog post.
Speaker 1:And how do you monetize? None, zero, no monetizing.
Speaker 3:Zero.
Speaker 1:On purpose. I don't look at my stats and I don't try to monetize my blog. If I did either of those things, the blog wouldn't work. What I'm thinking about is, as the world goes on, how do people like you that have ideas that they want to spread do it in a way that it's not? I mean, being smart and clever is one thing, but you also need to eat.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:The things you're describing is, you know, is you don't make money on books. You have the speaker. Industry is sort of in decline. You have a blog that doesn't monetize. How does someone make a living doing that?
Speaker 3:That's not you that hasn't built up.
Speaker 1:I'm assuming you live comfortably and you've done a thousand talks or whatever. You've done a thousand talks, or whatever.
Speaker 3:So the first thing is, I haven't met anyone who said everyone is entitled to make a living doing anything, and I don't feel like. Let me say it this way the best way to make a living is to create value. If you can create value, there's always going to be a line out the door for people who want you to do it again, and you will get some portion of the value you create. I think the worst way to make a living is to hold value hostage as a monopolist or somebody who just has authority, who's charging a tax to people when they should have choices. But leaving that part aside, creating value. Well, creating value has to do with systems, because if the system, which, in the case of books, was perfect for such a long time, they made exactly the right number of books to fit into the spots in the right number of bookstores. And the number of bookstores is exactly the right size, because if it wasn't, it would adjust to match, and the output of that exactness was a place where a very small group of people could make a living writing books. It was never a big enough number. Okay, so we blow up the means of distribution, which means that all those things that were perfect aren't perfect anymore. Some people who grew up with the old system or were kids when the old system was around would love to be able to play by the rules of the old system. But it's not a useful path for most people to go down because, as the system is stressed out, it tends to reward old names, famous names. It's super easy to get your boss to give you $10 million to pay in advance to a famous, famous author who was a politician, but really hard to get your boss excited about a brand new novelist, because it's just not going to happen as often. So how do you make a living?
Speaker 3:Well, I believe that the huge shift of the network effect is that what humans have discovered is they like being in community, that it's easy to watch the same TV show as everybody else has watched, but it's really extraordinary to be in a subreddit with 10,000 other people just like you who are in sync. And if you can organize a community, lead a community, be part of a community, you can create value. And if you can create value, you can make a living. And so you know, I can think of 10,000 products, hobbies, commercial entities where small groups of people can make a living by assembling community, feeding the community and creating value, by doing that in such a way that the community says sure, I'd be happy to pay for it.
Speaker 3:It's like Craig Mudd, whose book came out this week, makes a living walking across Japan and writing about it, and he can't do that if he's depending on a check coming from a New York City book publisher every three years and then he has to write a book. So he can do it. If there are 40,000 people in his community, some of whom buy his 2,000 copy limited edition books, that's enough. And so Craig doesn't have to compromise what he's making for the masses. He can make exactly what he wants to make for the smallest viable audience. So again, it's not perfect, but it's working for the people who see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what do you think? And I'm assuming you thought a lot about this, because everyone has, especially people that are sort of forward thinking how is AI going to change? Well, let's start broadly. First, the world. What is it? Because it seems very hard for a lot of people to grasp what we have now. You know, when you talk to people, they point to something and say, well, it's like it's crap now, yep, and you say, you know, I say sure, but you're thinking about this in terms of linear progression. But if you really think about it, we're sort of at the bottom of a mountain starting to climb, yep, and we've taken two steps, and you're sort of saying this isn't really high. But even knowing that, I have no idea how the world will change, because it's so fundamental a shift in my mind, it's so interconnected into everything that I can't really begin to understand what the future looks like, which has probably always been true and has always been true. But I think it's just going to change so much faster than what we're used to.
Speaker 3:You know, step changes in systems always surprise me and they scare them. So let's think about the dawn of electricity. Two things to remember when electricity was young, thomas Edison had a big fight with George Westinghouse about AC versus DC, and he, in public, electrocuted elephants to scare people about the dangers of electricity. Shortly after that, the first appliance in people's homes was the washing machine. In those days no one had electrical outlets they hadn't been invented yet. So you would unscrew the light bulb in your house and screw in the plug for the washing machine. Then the washing machine would do its job.
Speaker 3:But the thing is washing machines are notoriously difficult to balance, so it would rock and move and more than a dozen people died because they were strangled by the cord connected to their washing machine as it walked around their house. So I think that AI is the biggest change in our world since electricity. And just like there were businesses who said we're not going to use electricity because that's newfangled, and then there are no businesses like that anymore, there are businesses that are saying we don't use AI.
Speaker 1:Which is impossible to think about even looking back and saying someone's saying no to electricity.
Speaker 3:Right, exactly, but for lots of good reasons. It was very dangerous and it was crude, and a handmade pot was better than so many things were better right. So AI shows up. It's the biggest change in our world since electricity, and, just like the people in the before electricity world had no way to visualize what electricity was going to do, they just had the blunt uses of electricity, like a light bulb, the same thing is going to happen with AI.
Speaker 3:Is it possible that an evil AI is going to run amok and turn us all into paperclips? Yeah, possibly. That will be interesting to watch because we can't do anything about it. But I think it's more likely that the next few cycles of AI are going to stop being about you interacting with this math program that doesn't know anything and somehow comes up with ideas that we interpret as being smart, to AI connecting humans to one another, connecting them in a way that's dramatically more powerful than the way the internet connects humans to one another, and the leap that that will lead to. And then, when we combine that with the leaps in productivity and health, it will be stunning Not all good news in a lot of ways, and also for people who create with words, the amount of AI slop, ai spam, ai genre stuff is just going to overwhelm the good stuff for a long time and I'm not happy about that.
Speaker 3:But again, there's not a lot to be done. The same way, when desktop publishing showed up, all the typesetters said type's going to suck. And they were right until it settles down. And then, really well, set type is still better than junkie type. And do you think?
Speaker 1:is it possible, other than just making the prediction of everything that's going to change? Is it possible to make a prediction of how and what will change, with any kind of, if not certainty, then likelihood?
Speaker 3:Well, I think that when the steam shovel came along, it was pretty easy to say the average ditch digger is probably out of work, right. But it might not have been easy to say there's going to be an international, a interstate highway system, yeah. So I think that there's. You know, the people who write pretty good ad copy and pretty good genre fiction and pretty good journalism. They're going to have some trouble. But I don't have a lot of confidence about much more granularity after that. Right, that it's going to create opportunities for people who maybe didn't have access to other things. It's going to, you know.
Speaker 3:So I just saw a tool the other day. Guy trained a few AIs to adopt personas. So he said to this AI you're a 27 year old single mom, you live in San Francisco, you do this and this, and then this AI you're like this and this. So he's got thousands of these AIs pre-trained. It's not very hard to do. And then you can run a focus group where you can say what do you think about this idea, and they'll all chime in from their point of view and then you can synthesize what they said.
Speaker 3:This is not statistically significant. That's not its purpose. Its purpose is, all of a sudden, we let these synthesized voices into the room and maybe you, as the decision maker, are going to think differently about what's next. Or if I think about Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age, which I hope everyone who's into AI reads, it's 20 plus years old. In the Diamond Age, a super rich guy in a strange world hires an engineer to invent the iPad and this is before the iPad came out and have the iPad accompany his three-year-old girl for the rest of her life, narrating for her and creating challenges for her, so that she will develop into the person she could be.
Speaker 1:When we think about education and the way we do it now, it is inconceivable to me that in an AI world, education looks anything like it looks now, but, as you point out again in your book, systems push back against change, and so we have all these systems in place for an old world and a new world always more rapidly coming. What's the clash there of? You know, politics are always, you know, years behind innovation, like regulating Yep In this case. I don't know how anything will be regulated, because as soon as it's regulated, it's probably outdated.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can't regulate it. I can't even describe how I would regulate it if I was the emperor of the whole world, right? So systems have gatekeepers. Those gatekeepers control assets and they will fight like crazy to defend the gate. And so the music industry, for example, successfully defended the scarcity of media spectrum so that the radio stations would stay valuable. They defended the idea of CDs or vinyl so there would be this souvenir edition they can make money from, et cetera, et cetera. But what they couldn't stop is someone going after a gate they're not even close to. And so Napster opened the door for Spotify and YouTube to completely upend the music industry.
Speaker 3:Because Napster didn't need their permission. Ai doesn't need permission from Random House, right, even if they stop stealing books and as an author, I want them to have the knowledge I put in the world. That's why I put it in the world. But some authors don't. Even if they took it all out, it wouldn't matter. They didn't need the permission of the few published authors to create this thing that would enable 10 million people to write who had never written before. So now, if there's no barrier to creating 100 pages of something and there's no barrier to distributing 100 pages of something the system can't stop you. That's why technology and the network effect have been so potent at upending our world, because the people in power couldn't stop it.
Speaker 1:What usually happens, though I mean what happened with the internet and technology is that there it's not that there aren't people in power, it's just different people in power.
Speaker 3:No, there was no one in power when the upending was going on. You mean in the middle of it.
Speaker 3:At the beginning of it, right. So when email shows up, no one was in power with email. That's why my plan to get rid of spam didn't work, because when I was at Yahoo, I sat down with key people from AOL, yahoo and one or two other places and they said we can stop spam forever. Right now. All we got to do is put stamps on email, so every human being gets 100 emails a day for free. If you want to send more than 100 emails, they're a penny each, and if the major people who were trafficking email measured this and stopped any email that didn't have a stamp on it after 100, bam, it would go away.
Speaker 3:But no one was in charge enough to commit to that, because it was this amorphous thing that was flowing. It wasn't someone defending a system. And if there's no question, the people who designed the algorithms at Facebook or Instagram or TikTok are changing our culture, but when the thing is nascent, they're not thinking about that. No one can stop whatever evolves, which is part of the reason why so much that tech makes is sloppy and has negative side effects, because the people who were building it weren't thinking about the fact they were changing the culture forever. They were just trying to get from 1,000 users to 10,000 users.
Speaker 1:And that's the same feeling I get when I talk to anyone in AI. Yeah, they don't really know what they're doing. Correct, not really. I mean they say that I talked to someone high up in one of the leading AI companies and I was asking him about predictions and he said I can predict maybe six months.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Also, not only don't they have a long-term plan, but they're not willing to say to their team this is the difference between work we love and work we don't. These are our standards for what great stuff looks like. So that culture of it's not just moving fast and breaking things, it's moving fast in many directions that no one seems to be in charge of, and a critical symptom of this it's not the cause of it, but a symptom of this is look how terrible the names, the logos and the naming protocols for all of these companies are, Because they're just a bunch of engineers making stuff and then after the fact they say to someone in marketing slap something on this. Whereas when you're hoping to build a generative, resilient system, it really helps to have a philosophy, and there was a brief time when Google had a philosophy right.
Speaker 3:Organizing the world's information is a really cool philosophy because that says this is why we should have RSS, Google Reader, Because we're not going to build Google Reader to make a profit. We're going to build Google Reader because there's all this information in blogs and if we can help organize that, that's part of our mission. And then when the stock price starts going up and people need it to keep going up, that still goes out the window and the mission becomes make the stock price go up, and that's really sad to see.
Speaker 1:But if you could, would you stop AI progression? No?
Speaker 3:Even though we don't know where it's going, we don't know the impact, we don't know what it will destroy or what it will create, you would say let's go.
Speaker 3:I think that the I mean the hypothetical is, of course, crazy, because I can't stop it. Sure, the hypothetical is, of course, crazy, because I can't stop. Sure, how do we keep 8 billion people on a resilient path forward when the systems we created are self-destructing, when we start running out of species and we start changing the temperature of the planet? We are on a path that we don't know what to do with and we're asking ourselves how do we get out of this? And the answer that most people seem comfortable with is not make hard decisions today. It's hope for technology to help us tomorrow. So, yeah, I am an optimist because it's a useful tool, and my hope is that more synchronization of more insight by AI is our best shot at coming up with whatever happens after this, because it's certainly not the opposite. The opposite is not people going by instinct and grabbing what they can and pushing everybody else down. I don't see how that gets us where we hope to go.
Speaker 1:So you think we need a different entity to save us?
Speaker 3:No, not to save us but to again. We live in a system. Our system's better when they have better information about themselves and across their component. I hope the answer is yes. A library with a card catalog is better than a library without a card catalog. We have way more information about how the world is today thanks to tech and electronics and measurement than we did 50 years ago, and that causes us to make better decisions. Sometimes it causes those bad decisions to ripple even further, but we make better decisions. We stop smoking cigarettes because now we know for sure that they'll kill you. So what happens if we multiply the amount of information we have among and between us by a factor of a thousand? I would like to think that that synthesized information will open the door for something more resilient.
Speaker 1:Just to challenge that a little bit, please. What we I mean what you're describing in many ways is what a lot of people described with what the internet would do.
Speaker 3:Yep, I was one of those people. Yeah, me too. My unvarnished optimism was overstated.
Speaker 1:Me too, and I think, looking back and I've worked in that industry for 25 years but looking back, I don't know, if you know, there's definitely some good that it did, but I also recognize that there's so much bad that I'm not even sure, looking back, whether, if somebody asked me now whether we should have created the internet or not, I'm not sure what I would answer, whether it helped create a better world, I'm not sure.
Speaker 3:Okay, so what year if you could live in any year in human history. What year would you want to live in? 1997. 1997. And why did you pick 1997?
Speaker 1:I was 20 and I was happy Right, but that's not about the year that why did you pick 1997?
Speaker 3:I was 20 and I was happy, right, but that's not about the year that's about you?
Speaker 1:No, I know, but I also. I mean, I haven't thought about this question, but I think it was a time it was pre-Line 11. It was after the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union was gone. It seemed like we were on a path towards a much more peaceful world, and maybe that was just because I was 20 and wasn't paying attention. But looking back it seems still like the 90s in general were pretty good.
Speaker 3:So if you look at the newspapers of the time and you look at the controversies of the time and the challenges of the time and the impeachments in my country, etc. It was a train wreck.
Speaker 1:But it was impeachments about an affair.
Speaker 3:No, I'm just saying but it was about it was you could point to so many cultural things that started going out of whack during the 90s. I was born in between the Berlin blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the number of people in abject poverty as a percentage of the world population was significantly higher. The number of people who were dying from diseases we've cured was enormous. As I look at what we've been doing as a culture, we have made a whole bunch of people miserable. We have left all sorts of negative side effects in the world, but we've also created all these miracles that we take for granted right, the supercomputer in our pocket, et cetera. So none of it is an unalloyed good thing, but what's interesting to me is to say all right, but it's a thing. So, now that we have this, how do we create a cultural system that pushes people with influence to make better decisions? Because, at least for now, people with influence are the ones making decisions technologists and people with power, et cetera and I think we do that by keeping track of the right things, celebrating the right people and sharing information about what we prize, and when we lose track of that, then people start doing things. Like you know, if you look at a steroid-fueled bodybuilder that is a hero in their local gym. If they walked into a gym in 1964, they would be shunned. They would be a freak. No one would say how do I look like you? Because over time the standard of beauty shifts.
Speaker 3:So the standard of beauty when you and I were cheerleaders for the internet was did you build something that was open source? Did you build something that gave lots of people access to each other? Did you build something that was clever or beautiful? What I've seen is other people have because they've been celebrated with. How much money did you raise? How soon did you go public? How many people do you have power over? They're not treasuring any of those things because they're surrounded by people who aren't treasuring those things. So I think we have a bit of an obligation to highlight all the leverage we have and to say you know what? This is a better AI than that one? Not because more people use it, but because it feels like it's taking us in the direction that we, as people, should go, and that cultural underpinning feels to me to be in flux right now. Too many people are keeping track of how much money do you have, and not enough people are keeping track of. What kind of beauty did you create?
Speaker 1:But I think that's a byproduct of the product. It's moving so fast that there's no time to have that conversation. There is nobody that is willing to spend the time to sort of think about is this good for the world? Is this bad for the world?
Speaker 3:Well see, I'm not sure I agree with you. First of all, the people who are listening to your podcast aren't listening to it because you're promising to make them a billionaire tomorrow. I think the kind of people who toil to make the best designed bicycle, or people like Lynn Danzico who are building websites that are beauty to behold Craig Maude talking about what it's like to just walk there are plenty of people doing this, but are they working in AI? Are they working in AI? You know, I don't know anybody who actually works in AI. I just know people who say they work in AI. So you'll tell me, because I haven't met these people.
Speaker 1:I mean the ones that I know. I mean there are. I mean know people who say they work in AI. So you'll tell me, because I haven't met these people. I mean the ones that I know. I mean there are a lot of them, wonderful, great people, but they do feel like I think they are the cells, feel like they're cogs in a machine. They don't understand. They don't know where they're going, they don't know what the impact of the products is. The ones that have been in tech long enough realize you know, if they've been at Facebook, they realize that can have disastrous consequences. You can't really go into a meeting and say, hold on, let's stop development for a little bit, because we need to figure out where we're going yeah, so this is.
Speaker 3:I hope you'll get to go for a walk with Kevin Kelly and Kevin's book what Technology Wants. It's one of the best books I've ever read on any topic and it's about systems, and anytime you feel like you're a cog in a machine, you have a symptom of being in a system. And Kevin's argument is the best way to understand technology is to imagine that it's a different species that is evolving and evolving symbiotically with us, and it has succeeded beyond any measure. That the iPhone used us to procreate and to capture an enormous amount of attention, which is its fuel. So we got AI evolving as a species, using humans to help it. We can just give up and say whatever technology has in store for us, we're here for it.
Speaker 3:But there have been plenty of times when we've seen rapid changes in technology and we have still been able to say stop, you can't do that, because that is going to evolve the system in a way that we're not comfortable with. So I don't think we are going to be able to put in AI safeguards, the way some people talk about. But I think we have this cultural, cheerleading challenge of what makes somebody a hero. You know, I hope Sam Altman gets some new stock photos, because I keep seeing the same four pictures of him over and over again. But Sam is thinking all day long what do I do next on this journey? And part of what he's keeping track of is what's his status like with the fancy people of the world.
Speaker 1:Right. Just to be clear, my stance on AI is sort of center to skeptical. In the short run I'm very excited. In the long run I'm slightly terrified. And I think the terrified part comes from just imagining what could happen. And then talking to people that are working on it and asking them and they said maybe. And then you think, well, is it worth the risk? It's not a real question because nobody's going to stop it. It's going to happen, but it's more sort of just, if I could, would I stop it, because there are so many existential things that I think about when I think about AI that I don't think we have thought through.
Speaker 1:I don't know what AI means for distribution of wealth and power. I worry that it further creates. There will be a handful of monopolies that control these AIs and with that they can, if they want, to adapt the output to create alignment around something or whatever they want to do. And then the other thing is I don't know how you grow from a junior or something into an expert in an AI world. I think what we're at least seeing now is we have, if you're very good at something, ai can really help you.
Speaker 1:If you're not good at something, I'm not sure how much AI helps you, because you don't understand. You don't know what the questions are, you don't know how to interact with it, and you'll just find it can verify pretty much. It's like the internet or the Bible. It can verify whatever you want if you ask it in a specific way. What I'm worried about as well is how do I? I have an eight-year-old and a 13-year-old. Both of those when they go to college and once they graduate, if they go to college, they're going to have a job that is junior in something.
Speaker 3:Well, no, I'm not giving you that one for sure, but go on.
Speaker 1:Okay, they will come into a world where they know fairly little about how that industry works. In the past there was a track where you could move up and it took years. It takes, I don't know, 10, 15 years until you're an expert. But if there's no need for that junior person, how do they become an expert? If there's no need for any of the new people, let's go back to this idea of creating value.
Speaker 3:Okay, so 12-year-olds are about a thousand times better than me at TikTok and many other forms of social media. If I needed to hire somebody to create value in engaging in that media, I would be stupid to hire one of my peers. So they've evolved insight and expertise in much less than 10 years. They might not have judgment Judgment takes longer than that but what we're talking about here so far is here are steam shovels, not shovels, and a steam shovel lets an amateur dig a really big hole really fast compared to a shovel.
Speaker 3:And once you have steam shovels, people who decide to put in the cycles at steam shovel usage are worth hiring for the important, fancy, difficult job. But in general, you can dig more holes more often, more reliably, with steam shovels than with regular shovels, so average steam shovel operators can create more value. So here's this tool that's coming along. It's taking all these things we used to think of as indispensable job and making them trivial. So the amount of value a human can create is even negative compared to what a sophisticated AI will be able to do. All right, fine, but every other time in human history that technology has shown up like that, it has invented more jobs than it took away. So this time might be different, but if it's so, it's going to be the first time that ever happened.
Speaker 1:I think the reason it might be the first time that it ever happened is because it's so fast and so broad that when jobs disappeared because of new inventions in the past, that will usually happen over decades. Now it can happen in months and it can happen across multiple sectors, and I'm not sure if we're going to be fast enough to create new jobs or have new ideas to fill the holes for all those people.
Speaker 3:Well, on the geologic scale, the shifts in the 1920s and 30s were blindingly fast compared to anything that happened before. So it's the same order of magnitude compared to what we're used to. But let's say we're slow at it. Then what Is that? A question to me?
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's say we're slow at dealing with this, I think. If we're slow at it, I think we could end in a collapse of civilization.
Speaker 3:And what would that collapse feel like? Horrible Well, I know collapses are horrible. I mean, what would it look like?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, if let's say and I'm not saying this is the case let's say, half the population is unemployed After a certain amount of time, there isn't enough taxes, there isn't enough.
Speaker 3:And half the population would be unemployed because there was no way for them to create value or there's not enough value to go around.
Speaker 1:There is no way for them to create value. That is beyond what a machine can make.
Speaker 3:Well, the other half of the population, I presume, is creating even more value than they used to. Yeah, okay, and so, as the amount of value getting created goes up, some people are going to harvest quote more than their fair share. So, I think we can argue that, given income inequality, it's always been more than their fair share. Yeah, when those people do that, don't we think they're going to invent new things? They need things that they want to pay for that an AI can't do I mean?
Speaker 1:then at that point it would just be something that's very labor-intensive until the robots catch up.
Speaker 3:Okay, great. So then there's all these labor-intensive things to be done by people who used to do things that an AI does now, including people like me, right, because one? I'm arguing that an AI can't write a blog post as good as mine, but it's getting close. So someone like me becomes, at some level, unemployed because an AI does the things that I used to do to create value. So now people who have created value in other ways come up with things they want me to do for them, and they might not be things I want to do, but it's not going to lead to 50% unemployment because there are still things to be done. Why do you live in this town? Why do I live in this town?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Of all the places that I could choose to live, this is certainly in the top 10. I get to be 40 minutes from one of the greatest cities in the world, but I don't have to deal with the fact that I'm in a city because I'm not.
Speaker 3:The people who live here are very aware of this magical liminal space between the city and the suburb, and there's a real passion for fairness here that people, even though we're right near New York City, tend not to have sharp elbows, tend not to pick fights. It's much more about building a place where you're happy to be here, and I'm a quarter mile from the Hudson River, which is a spectacular body of water that I get to paddle my canoe on, and this is where I raised my family, and so where else would I want to be?
Speaker 1:It's a nice town. Is it part of New York City?
Speaker 3:No, there's a city called Yonkers, which is one of the biggest cities in New York. That's the next town over, and then we're a village. That's not a city.
Speaker 1:And you mentioned earlier that there's, you know, there's 2,000 homes. There are 100 published authors, more, more than 100. Why is that?
Speaker 3:I think there are two reasons for it. The first reason is that published authors want to live here because it's a place that admires that sort of brainy, scholarship idea thinking. And I think the other reason is that once you are here, you earn status and connection in the community, not by having the biggest, fanciest house, but by having something to say. I mean, it's interesting. There are all these interesting things about living in a small town. The place where my office is is an apartment building and it took years and years and years to get it approved, because the mindset is our problem isn't scale, our problem is community. So just because someone wants to build something of scale doesn't mean we should say yes, and it's a real challenge. You know, if we think about Ezra and Derek's book on abundance, how do we continue to create places where people want to live and situations that can fuel them? At the same time we protect the ones we already have? Is the answer more density all the time?
Speaker 1:And you don't think so.
Speaker 3:I don't think so. I don't think having 16 billion people on Earth will make Earth better than having 8 billion people, and, as someone who loves to be in the wilderness of northern Ontario, I don't want them to build a really nice snack bar on that lake. That lake is better the way the lake is. So more is not the answer. How do we create cycles toward better? So it's interesting when you think about something like solar energy, because the history of the world has always been about human beings' need for energy in any flood, and one of the biggest changes to everything was when they discovered oil in Pennsylvania and then in Texas, because all of a sudden this free power came out of the ground.
Speaker 3:And we organized the whole world around that simple idea and it poisoned us. So then we have solar and, maybe one day, fusion. When they show up and say, here's free power off the grid, all you want, what will we do with it?
Speaker 3:And the answer is should we strip mine everything around us to build more and more and more? And if so, what kind? So, when I think about why there's so many homeless people in Los Angeles and California, well, the data says it's because there aren't enough houses in Los Angeles and California. If you figure out how to make housing, you save so many people from so much trauma, but I don't know how to do that, and so it's not that there's a right answer, it's that there's a conflict. So here we are. This is where I work. There used to be five people who came to work here every day, but now it's just me.
Speaker 1:I would write my blog even if no one read it. Would you read the Seth Godin AI blog?
Speaker 3:If it was good. I keep looking for blogs that will do for me what I hope. So far, my blog is not in a giant category for me as a reader, but AI is clearly going to do so, and that's okay with me. Scarcity is not my friend. Abundance is my friend.
Speaker 1:I think that's a good end to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Victory. Yeah, I need to offer you some dark chocolate. Can I turn this off?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, that was Sash Godin. What do you think? Wow, that was, that was Seth Godin. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Wow, that was. That was well, I mean. Again, I learned so many amazing things just listening to this human, and I obviously have to. I'm an audio book kind of gal. I think I'm going to dive into some Seth Godin books right now.
Speaker 2:I think mainly I mean your conversation about AI that you just ended on right here at the very end, very, very, very insightful. And yes, every new technology has always scared everybody, and I kind of share your view on AI as well. Like I am centrist but pessimistic because and I don't and I don't think we can fight it or stop it I don't have those notions either, but he seemed pretty even keeled about it, about like harnessing it and figure out a way to connect humans. Obviously, living in a small town makes it so that he is very preoccupied with this sense of community which is, you know, one of those blue planet no, not the blue planet, the blue cities where people live forever, like one of the main things is like having a sense of community and belonging. And he's quite the force, this man. It's so incredible.
Speaker 1:Yes, he is, and he did not let me down in this that every time I talk to him, every question that I ask have ever asked him. He seems to have thought about it a lot. It doesn't matter what it is, he always has an anecdote. He always has a lot. It doesn't matter what it is, he always has an anecdote, he always has a comparison, he always has a really deep understanding of the subject and ties it together and sort of regurgitates it back in a way that is understandable, which is really admirable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in layman's term it's palatable. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But also, you know he's not going to let you off the hook or anybody he's talking to. If you say something, he's going to be like well, tell me what that looks like, like, what is that like? Just you can't just say that, what does that look like? And just presses you on to finish that thought, which is just obviously the way that his brain works yeah and a lot to a lot to learn from this man, a lot to look up to.
Speaker 1:It's amazing yeah, um, I learned a lot. I mean just there's so much to take from. But you know he's been an author, you know he has spent a lot of his life sort of known as an author, but he understands that that world is kind of dying. He spent a lot of his time as a public speaker. He is. He used to speak all over the world and he made an interesting choice a few years ago, as he mentioned. He sort of stopped flying for work.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Which is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he said, I don't fly for work anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's kind of crazy, so people just come to him yeah.
Speaker 1:Which was. We talked a little bit later and I was asking about this and he said it was an environmental choice.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:He just said can't justify it. Whoa, on top of him just wanting to spend more time with his you know at home and more focused, but he also, like that's an industry that's dying. He's been blogging and writing and that's an interesting industry that he talks about as sort of AI is going to take over, and so he's just seen all these things sort of crumble. And for someone like that, what you would expect is that they will be, you know, pessimistic.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And he is the opposite. He has a silver lining for every single thing. He really does he always looks at the positive and it's just. It's really inspiring to be around him and sort of realizing that sure, things are going to change, some of it's going to be bad, but we all have authority and influence over how we change the world and, maybe not least of all, how we look at the world.
Speaker 2:Exactly. He's like okay, challenge accepted, how can I? It's like an escape room for him. He's basically like we will engineer our way out of this or into this, not out or in. You know, like he's not leaning into I. I do agree like we. We joke about it here in hollywood that like ai is like you know, it can never. Ai has never fallen in love. Ai has never lost a human being that they love dearly.
Speaker 2:That has devastated. So, whatever ai will ever write, it will never have, uh, the sincerity of of what a human has ever written, even though it reads everything in a second that has been ever published. It will never be that so like. Why are we? We're so scared that it's taking over like a film industry and like there's ai studios not making prompt movies that it just doesn't even have actors with. They all have six fingers still and I don't know. But why aren't they cleaning up the oceans and making cancer go away? And and like AI? For that is like incredible. I mean that really is the next frontier of mankind. I hope it'll be used for good. But as we know that the internet, it's like it went great. And then you know, like you talked about spam. I mean that's interesting. I never knew about spam. If they had stamps on emails, yeah, that's brilliant I thought that was had stamps on emails.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's brilliant. I thought that was a really fun idea. Yeah, it's a great idea, so low impact.
Speaker 2:So so easy.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So, brilliant. So clear yeah.
Speaker 1:And all the. You know he has these small. I mean obviously that didn't take off.
Speaker 2:No, because we would have had a different world if that would have been the deal you know. But if that would have been the deal you know.
Speaker 1:But he has these little insights and he's constantly thinking about some things and I just loved his way of when he talks about his blog. He said something to the effect of when he sees something he doesn't understand, that's what he's drawn to and he goes into it and he wants to try and understand it, make sense of it and then explain it to other people. And that's how like that curiosity is, is how he the reason why he's able to talk about all these things with such insight is because of that ability to just jump on it and say I don't, I don't get this, I'm going to dig deep into it and then I'm going to tie it all together and make it make sense.
Speaker 2:It's, that's, I mean that's, and that is the type of mindset we need at every century, at every, every period. You know, all the time it's really necessary to, to, to be that human because, as the world kind of I sometimes I does is the world getting dumber and dumber or it's just dumb getting louder. Uh, you know, because there's so many avenues to be loud. I mean, back in the middle ages and stuff, there was no, you know, there was no social media, so you can just tell everybody that you believe the earth was flat and, like today, the flat earther people have never been a bigger community. It's like what's happening? I do have, I think, do you want to hear my? I can actually debunk flat earth real fast. Are you ready?
Speaker 3:Okay, it's going to burst the bubble Show me.
Speaker 2:where are all the travels? Where are all the Cancun spring break trips to these hotels that are at the end of the earth? Where are they? Where the, where the tiktoks from the influencers standing, where the ocean is falling off? Where's the real estate? Right if it's true, please I take me to there, but we have yet to see it yeah, yeah, you would have mr beast filming filming there constantly.
Speaker 2:He'd have a property right there on the edge of the watching the ocean. Fall off the plate that we are spinning on, apparently, but yeah. So I mean, that's my, that's my little kooky version of coming from behind that problem to ask maybe flat earthers about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, like I said, every time I talk to him I kind of fall in love with him. He is just, and speaking of falling in love, one of the things that he mentions is something I've thought a lot about and do think a lot about is don't fall in love with one idea.
Speaker 2:I think that's a very common problem from people.
Speaker 1:You meet someone that's been working on a book or an idea for years and years and nothing has really happened. And it's often because they think that that one idea is it that's the holy grail, but usually it's working. Because they think that that one idea is it that's the holy grail, but usually it's working on the idea and working on many ideas that ultimately leads to something being good.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And I think there is such a high premium for a lot of people on ideas. I think the high premium should be on the time you spend on iterating and thinking about it.
Speaker 2:The process, the journey to your idea, and maybe you find out it's a horrible idea, but you, on your quest, found the crux of something else. I mean, we've all been down that road and that's very sage advice Very sage advice Everybody should all the time. It's a beautiful thing to stay open.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just this idea, which I've never heard anyone articulate before, which I thought was terrifying but very interesting If you have an idea, if you have a business idea, build three different, unique business cases for it.
Speaker 2:Ah, yes, yes.
Speaker 1:What you usually get is you get one, really honed one, but if you have three, you have to allow yourself to think about the challenges with each of these ideas and then have like, okay, well, if I don't do that, then this is the option, and I think that's true, for obviously you know a business, but for any idea of just yeah what are the different ways you can do this?
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And really, really examine and go deep into that before you commit to which path you're going to go down.
Speaker 2:Forcing your brain to get to the alternative sides of what your idea is, to come at it at every angle, to maybe even unlock. You know so many. I mean, like you know, good examples like hemp, you know, not just for the THC, blah, blah, blah, but like for toilet paper. For this, you know, there's like something that people didn't think was one thing. And it's good. With water, less water, use this, this, this, this, this. There's like it's just a small example of like how people thought it was a bad thing because people are just going to be high from smoking weed, you know, and then, like, here it is, there's a multiple solve for so many things, you know.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, everybody benefits from that yeah, so, yeah, I deeply respect this man, really love him and, like you have, since I talked to him, I listened to even I've read a few of his books I've been listening to. He also had has a voice. Some people have these voices where you just even if he was reading ludicrous things, yes, it would sound interesting he does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's very compelling and so, yeah, I just love listening to him, so I I have a bunch of his audiobooks now and I'm just cranking through them I want, so I want to be at your next dinner party or game night and I want to meet this man and sit with him and talk.
Speaker 2:There's nothing more that I love than interesting people that have so much to say and so much to share. Like you said, so free with this information. For somebody who comes from that tech world, that's kind of like and you did mention that it's not to create value for the few, but it's to create value for, for, for, for more people, you know, for the community very inspiring need, more of this need. We don't need people to go to space necessarily. How about just this, this guy? There's no plan b for this planet.
Speaker 1:Let's just try and focus on making that a little better uh, yeah, so so much respect for him, so yes, well thank you for this thank you honey to see you as always, always, and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 2:See you next week. Can't wait to see who you're talking to next.
Speaker 1:Okay, bye, bye, bye. Thank you for listening to let's Walk. This episode was produced by Harald Thorlundsson and edited by Gunnar Hansson. Our theme song is by Alpni Runar Kløversson. Thank you.